🔮 Big tech multilateralism; corona vs carbon; VCs, scientists and a less wobbly Earth++ #265

I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

👐 Starting today until the end of the month, we’re donating 35% of our revenue from new annual subscriptions to fighting the pandemic. Read more in my end note about how you can help.

💬 Join me next week in a live discussion with editor-in-chief at MIT Tech Review, Gideon Lichfield, as we discuss the state of the pandemic and the world after Covid-19. More details and RSVP here.

The near future

🤳 Google and Apple have teamed up to offer a set of tools, APIs, to allow health authorities and others to build contact tracing apps. This is a big deal: between them, Apple and Google’s Android have a smidgen over 99% market share of smartphones. The APIs should have “privacy central to the design” and it appears that they have taken steps to do that. (Google’s won’t be using location data from this app to shill to advert…